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Frustrated with students’ use of cell phones in class, a British Columbia high school principal took action last week — he bought a signal jammer online, and plugged it in at his office.
Unfortunately for him, jamming cell phones is illegal under Canadian law.
Principal Steve Gray installed the gizmo on Tuesday. By the end of the day Wednesday rumors of the jammer’s existence were beginning to spread. On Thursday, more than a quarter of Port Hardy Secondary School’s 343 students skipped classes in protest, and on Friday morning Gray took the jammer offline.
“We did our research on the Internet,” said Amber Wright, an eleventh grader who helped organize the student strike. “Breaking the law is not a good way to send a message.”
Students said that their parents use the cell phones to keep in touch with them, and that relaying messages through the school is slow and cumbersome.
Principal Gray told the Toronto Globe and Mail that he himself carries a cell phone at school, but that he only uses it in emergencies.
A selection of student activist news from fifty years ago this month, courtesy of the archives of the New York Times.
March 1, 1959: High school students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil begin a strike against increases in private school tuition. By five days later of all the city’s students are participating in the strike. Meanwhile, two hundred students at England’s Cambridge University march in opposition to the appearance of an “ugly” new building on their campus.
March 2, 1959: Crowds in La Paz burn an American flag and stone the US embassy in response to reports that an American diplomat has called for the country of Bolivia to be broken up. One student is shot and killed by police in the demonstrations.
March 3, 1959: Nearly two hundred students are arrested in Bogota, Colombia during the course of mass protests against increases in bus fares.
March 4, 1959: Professors and college administrators attending the National Conference on Higher Education in Chicago pass a resolution calling for the repeal of a law that requires college students to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States before receiving federal financial aid.
March 5, 1959: Police in Goiania, Brazil kill one student and injure 160 more when they break up a demonstration against tuition hikes. Students riot in protest of the violence the following day, setting fire to two buildings.
March 7, 1959: Tens of thousands of Catholic students march in Vienna, Austria to protest plans to stage a communist World Youth Festival in that city in July.
March 14, 1959: A three-day conference of campus newspaper editors, sponsored by the United States National Student Association, opens in New York City. More than one hundred student editors from around the United States are in attendance at the conference, which will become an annual event.
March 16, 1959: Forty Yale undergraduates are arrested and the entire undergraduate student body is placed on probation after two snowball fights, one at the New Haven St. Patrick’s Day parade, turned into riots.
March 18, 1959: The twenty-one black students in Virginia’s Warren County High School enter their second month as the school’s only attendees. The federal government ordered the school opened on an integrated basis in February, and since then none of the school’s one thousand white students have attended class.
March 27, 1959: Marching bands from two black high schools drop out of a ceremony honoring Richmond, Virginia’s minor league baseball team to protest segregated seating at the event.
March 28, 1959: Six hundred students stage a rally against nuclear weapons in New York City’s Bryant Park. Speakers include AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Norman Thomas. Seventy-five of the students march overnight to the rally site from outside the city; some are detained by police en route.
March 30, 1959: Fifteen thousand anti-nuclear protesters march in London, England, demanding that Britain unilaterally give up its atomic weapons and that the United States close its British military bases. The march includes a substantial student contingent.
Bhumika Muchhala, a recent graduate who is now working full-time in USAS’s national office, says anti-sweatshop activism can be “cliquish.” She describes a close-knit, white hippie activist culture that is “not welcoming to people of color.” … Dave Thurston, a black USAS activist who attends CUNY’s Hunter College, agrees that the organization can be inhospitably white and middle-class, semi-indignantly citing the all-vegan food at conferences. “Oh my fucking word,” he sighs, “and twinkling!” (Twinkling is a hand gesture that comes from the Quakers, used to signify assent without disrupting the meeting or repeating what they’ve said; while many find it useful, it can feel alienating to outsiders, and is often cited as a symbol of the odd, cultish behavior of white activists.)
–Liza Featherstone, Students Against Sweatshops, 2001.
Here’s the latest communiqué from The New School In Exile:
No, we haven’t forgotten about April 1st, and neither has the administration. But don’t worry, there is plenty in the works, and the day should not disappoint.
Think carnival. Think circus. Think roving flash mobs. Think zombie Kerrey and Murtha armies. Think beanbag circus freaks and superheroes. Think shutting the school down. Think fun 
We’ll see you on the flip side!
I’ll admit it. They’ve got my attention.
Update: NSIE has put up a countdown clock on their website. Zero hour is just after one o’clock tomorrow afternoon — 1:01:59 pm, to be exact. I have no idea what, if anything, this means.
A professor at the University of East London has been suspended from his position for predicting that there may “be real bankers hanging from lampposts” at Wednesday’s protests against the G20 economic summit.
Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology, is an organizer of G20 protests in London this week. He told the BBC that if bankers and government ministers don’t “surrender their power, obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty.”
Knight’s G20 Meltdown is just one of many groups planning actions in London this week, but Knight’s eagerness to make incendiary statements to the media has made him the most quoted figure in the movement right now.
The UEL’s decision to suspend him has confirmed that position.
studentactivism.net 
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